The real facts of activity that have in point of fact been systematically pleaded for by philosophers have, so far as my information goes, been of three principal types.

The first type takes a consciousness of wider time-span than ours to be the vehicle of the more real activity.  Its will is the agent, and its purpose is the action done.

The second type assumes that ‘ideas’ struggling with one another are the agents, and that the prevalence of one set of them is the action.

The third type believes that nerve-cells are the agents, and that resultant motor discharges are the acts achieved.

Now if we must de-realize our immediately felt activity-situations for the benefit of either of these types of substitute, we ought to know what the substitution practically involves. What practical difference ought it to make if, instead of saying naively that ‘I’ am active now in delivering this address, I say that a wider thinker is active, or that certain ideas are active, or that certain nerve-cells are active, in producing the result?

This would be the pragmatic meaning of the three hypotheses.  Let us take them in succession in seeking a reply.

If we assume a wider thinker, it is evident that his purposes envelop mine.  I am really lecturing for him; and altho I cannot surely know to what end, yet if I take him religiously, I can trust it to be a good end, and willingly connive.  I can be happy in thinking that my activity transmits his impulse, and that his ends prolong my own.  So long as I take him religiously, in short, he does not de-realize my activities.  He tends rather to corroborate the reality of them, so long as I believe both them and him to be good.

When now we turn to ideas, the case is different, inasmuch as ideas are supposed by the association psychology to influence each other only from next to next.  The ‘span’ of an idea, or pair of ideas, is assumed to be much smaller instead of being larger than that of my total conscious field.  The same results may get worked out in both cases, for this address is being given anyhow.  But the ideas supposed to ‘really’ work it out had no prevision of the whole of it; and if I was lecturing for an absolute thinker in the former case, so, by similar reasoning, are my ideas now lecturing for me, that is, accomplishing unwittingly a result which I approve and adopt.  But, when this passing lecture is over, there is nothing in the bare notion that ideas have been its agents that would seem to guarantee that my present purposes in lecturing will be prolonged. I may have ulterior developments in view; but there is no certainty that my ideas as such will wish to, or be able to, work them out.